Attributes in the Accelerant System

For today’s #MechanicsMonday, let’s talk about how attributes work in Accelerant games!

In the Accelerant system, you have a certain number of attributes that will have various values, depending on the specific game. The most common of these are: Vitality, Air, Earth, Fire, Water and Void, but there’s some room for individual games to define these separately.

At the beginning of each game you will start with each attribute at a given level (e.g., 2) based on game-specific characteristics (e.g., how many character points—CP—you’ve earned). Attributes cannot generally fall below zero.

Vitality is affected by healing and damage. If you take “1 damage by <anything>” then that comes out of your vitality. If you reach zero you are either stable (and will wake up after 5 minutes) or unstable (and will die after 1 minute). We’ll talk more about which one you end up in with a future #MechanicsMonday post.

Attributes may be renewed—or removed—through various mechanics in the game. The most important of which for now are skills.

For example, to borrow a page from the Accelerant game Occam’s Razor, let’s say that you have had your legs augmented (and bought the appropriate skills to augment them with character points, or CP). This carries with it certain costume requirements: you have to show that your legs are somehow augmented. You can move preternaturally fast for short periods of time. You can spend AA (Air Air, or 2 Air attributes) to call out “By my voice, short slow by speed.” Basically informing everyone who can hear you that you are now moving very quickly for the next ten seconds, so everyone else is slow by comparison.

So if you started with 2 in the Air attribute and you spend AA, you are now at 0 Air and will remain so until you either use or encounter some mechanic that replenishes or adds to Air in some way.

Some skills can only be used a certain number of times per day or per purchase or are otherwise limited (can only be used within the Neural Net, or the Dark Cloud), but the most common way to use active skills is through the expenditure of attribute points.

For the upcoming Etamui game you can expect a small subset of skills to be assigned that will use these attributes in different ways. Look for more information on this in the upcoming weeks.